Lynn Hunsaker is known worldwide as one of the best CX authors and analysts in the space. Join her and host Sally Mildren for a refreshing and challenging conversation covering everything from modernizing your Voice of Customer approach to generating clear ROI, to continuing education for CX leaders and so much more! Join CX Accelerator: https://www.cxaccelerator.com/community https://clearaction.com/ - Lynn's CX Mastery Education Resources Linked In: https://www.linkedin.com/company/clearactioncontinuum/
CXA Podcast, Ep 7 - Lynn Hunsaker
Hello and welcome to bring your own chair. A podcast by the cx accelerator community It's a
non profit that is set up and designed to help cx professionals At any stage of their career to
grow to expand and be at the top of their game.
I'm sally mildren your host I'm the ceo and chief strategist of clarity px. We're a boutique
agency that helps small and rural health care to really grow through aligned brand, Experience
and culture. We're so excited about today's message. We are talking today with our guest who
has a 30 plus year career in CX.
And it started with a little old task of being chair of a 12 country Six division task force to
design the customer satisfaction methodology for that organization Whoo talk about a big first
project, but she has deep expertise in cx in voice of the customer in customer satisfaction
corporate quality And leadership.
And she provides amazing insights that will benefit anyone in CX. Lynn Hunsaker ClearAction,
a customer experience consultancy that grows businesses by centering on the customer's
wellbeing. In her work, she is aiming for automatic experience excellence. She's recognized as
a seasoned customer experience thought leader and author.
She's an educator, a transformationist, an R. O. I. Strategist and innovator. And we're really
thrilled to have you here today. Thanks for being with us today, Lynn. It's my pleasure. Thanks
so much for inviting me.
I like to ask this question to start with, with all our guests is what led you to CX? It's not,
especially in 91. Yeah. It wasn't so common everywhere. So how'd you get here? Well, it was
actually more common than you think at that time, but, uh, I started my career after my MBA in
the strategic planning department as a strategic information manager.
And part of that involved going out to our customers. Across North America and interviewing
them to find out how they viewed our performance versus our competitors versus their
expectations as a bracket on each dimension of the experience and value. What, what was the
value for the price paid? And based on all of that insight, uh, we adapted our corporate
strategy accordingly, which I think is kind of rare today.
Wouldn't it be wonderful if more companies or every company did that? Right. So after a
couple of years, they said, look, we're doing a total quality management, uh, initiative, and part
of that is customer satisfaction. You're already doing that. Why don't you help us figure out
exactly what it means in this context of TQM and lead a task force to figure it out.
Because we were in a rural location, even though we were a fortune 250 company, they, uh,
Wanted me to go and research what it means instead of just figuring it out and doing it
because I'm a smart person, which was the way people do in Silicon Valley later on in my
career, but I had the luxury of going to visit John Goodman, for example, in Washington, D. C.,
who is very renowned for all these studies on, customer satisfaction, customer service, as well
as many other companies and providers. So that was really the start of it. And I began
speaking at conferences in 1992, the second annual AMAS ASQ customer satisfaction
conference, for example.
That is awesome. I, there's so many ways we can go with this conversation. We talked a lot
about a lot of things and I thought, Oh, this could be a three hour episode, but we're trying not
to do that today. One of the things in our setup conversation for this podcast. You talked a lot
about how, um, listening to the voice of the customer and, you know, some of the work you
just described is, um, that sometimes we get it wrong.
And there were a few things that stood out to me that I thought were so interesting. You said
that when we're listening to the voice of the customer, particularly with, you know, anything,
but now you're talking about. So cultural differences, geographic differences, all the things.
Um, one of the things that you said before was that when we're going after the voice of the
customer, we need to learn to ask more interesting questions and I loved that conversation
because you talked about how we're asking the wrong questions when we're going after
finding out what the customers really want or like or need and.
Often it's more about us than about them. So can you talk about that a little bit and maybe
share some examples for us? That's how can we be more interesting? And what are, where are
we going wrong with that? So, right. I mean, the way that things started for me, the dynamics
in America were that we had very strong competition from Japan.
Tony Walkman, for example, although consumer electronics were being taken over by
Japanese brands as a preference of American consumers. Also, the American steel industry,
semiconductor industry, automotive industries were facing. Really tremendous competition
from Japan. Essentially, we were just kind of getting too big for our britches here in America.
The, the, uh, government as, as well started a national quality award and, uh, customer
satisfaction and customer focus in leadership were really. Strong parts of that. So the whole
idea of doing customer experience research early in the 1990s was how do we make our
products and services and our policies and behaviors more in tune with what customers value?
So we were looking at how can we apply customer insights to getting ahead of the curve and
rising above the strong competition and becoming favored again among our own citizens as
well as, other markets. So I think that has kind of gone by the wayside with this whole notion of
what you recommend us and how many.
People, can we get to recommend us and, you know, tout that in public relations and for all of
our compensation and whatnot, it's become kind of a, it's own animal. And, um, I, I actually
have declined now to answer those surveys because I just don't feel like it's doing anything. I
don't think that it's really helping me or them, and it's not about me.
What I would like to answer is things about what I want, uh, what I ideas that I have that could
help them. Things that came to my mind during my experience that I felt. Hey, I wish they knew
this. That would be cool if they did it. So we need to be doing more expectations. VOC. In
addition to reality, VOC
That's so good. I love that. And I think, um, as I think on my career and even the conversations
we've had on the podcast previous there is a lot of chatter in our accelerator community
around surveys, surveying, all that kind of thing. But we've had a lot of talk about how do you
increase your value?
How do you create that burning platform for CX and increase your value as a professional
within the organization? And I think that This question is tied to that because if we're just
saying, how many stars do you give us? That's not really getting at actionable data to make
service changes or to make product changes or whatever.
I think that's super interesting. What other kinds of questions or things come to mind for you
that might be something that would be more important for us to get at to really. improve the
experience and not just feel good about ourselves, right? So most people are looking for quick
wins. They're looking for, um, what to work on by buying a large tech, putting a large amount of
their budget or.
Maybe even a hundred percent of their budget on a technology provider. And then seeing what
the data says and getting kind of wrapped around the wheel on this inner closed loop. They
never get to the outer closed loop and it's really not necessary. It's not a really wise path to go,
uh, because you already have customer insights on hand, for example, what customers are
telling you in customer service, start there and.
Get a plan before you go and blow your budget with one stop shopping, which really isn't true.
You need to be more thoughtful about how you're allocating your budget, all the needs. And
how do you figure out the needs? Pay attention to almost free VOC that you have coming into
your salespeople, your service people, whoever is interfacing with customers.
Even if you have a retail environment, uh, do some research with the people who interface with
your customers. So for example, if you have, uh, a way to, to review customer comments.
From these sources, even manually is doable, but if you could buy a data mining or voice
mining, that would be my first purchase if I were in your shoes.
So at any rate, whether you're just starting out or you've already been doing this for quite a
long time, pay attention to what customers. Uh, are saying to you as I'm trying to do X, but
now Y happened and Z is my consequence. There's hardly any kind of survey you can do that.
We'll tell you that furthermore, a lot of these technologies can tell you a lot about tone of voice,
pace of voice, words used
Pay attention to, first of all, uh, what are the things that change people's emotions. Uh, what,
what are those triggers in their, their story for being happier? Or being frustrated. Uh, and then
those are actually the moments of truth, right? Right. And if you're seeing prevalent issues, uh,
those are the things that, um, you should start with not necessarily quick wins, but what you
should do is.
I mean, quick wins aren't bad, but you need to make sure that if you're addressing prevalent
issues, if you really want to get high ROI and be super impressive to the executives. So how
you do it is you just take those prevalent issues and say, uh, how much is this costing us? Be
complete, but you can just say, Hey, for these customer service calls that have come in in the
past month on this one prevalent issue, we can calculate that it's costing us X.
Dollars to address this just in customer service. Now, when you add on escalation, uh,
remedies, uh, negative word of mouth, that's out there that now we have to do more in our
sales and marketing to make up for that negative word of mouth churn, that's also more
marketing and sales dollars. So you're kind of like piling up this story, but you're just using a
nugget of the costs.
And that will turn your executives on much more than any other study, benchmarking report, or
quick win that you can give because they'll think, my heavens, I never thought of it like that. I
had no idea that it was that amount. What if we could get to the root of it and stop those
costs? And put that money that would have gone to addressing that same prevalent issue next
month, next year, 10 years from now, still the same prevalent issue, it happens.
But what if you could stop that and redirect that budget and those resources, those people and
whatnot to something more constructive, a higher value opportunity for everyone. I call that
customer experience annuities. I found that executives really love that and it really takes a lot of
the pressure off of you for revenue uptick, redirect them to preventing these kind of insane
costs.
That's so good. And I can even say in my own career, when, when I try to bring a McKinsey
number or a Forrester number or a Gardner number or whatever, it's just kind of really, you're
giving me a research paper. They, it's not as motivating to your point as Hey, this issue keeps
coming up. I calculated that in our department alone, it's costing 400, 000 a month.
And then all of a sudden they're like, Holy cow, exactly. That is a lot of money and we can do
something about it. And at the same time, improve customer experience. So I love that you
talked about the negative word of mouth and in our conversation before you talked about
those as hidden costs.
And I think that, um, it's too easy to forget about that repercussion. You think about the one
survey metric or the one KPI that you're striving for. And it's interesting to me when we were
talking, you were talking about, I take a look at what is the cost to serve a customer, and when
I.
Calculate that with what I think it costs. Sometimes it costs more when we are accounting for
the hidden, those hidden things that are really dissatisfiers or really are, um, Unspoken, maybe
emotional needs or maybe practical needs or whatever. And so where do you think, is it the
same place that people are going to find that information that kind of, what are the triggers?
What words are they using? Where are they, where else can they look to be aware to the whole
scope of the cost? To take care of the customer. Right. So I found that when you pay attention
to customer comments and, try to understand what's behind those comments more, it leads
your curiosity to, um, do other types of research where you're.
Maybe looking at what people are saying in social media, what saying, uh, informally at the
trade show, uh, the symposium for your. Your industry or whatever, um, being more of a fly on
the wall to capture those things, uh, spending time with your customer facing people to
understand where, what they're noticing in body language and tone of voice and you know,
under the breath comments and whatnot that you're never really going to get directly.
And furthermore, a lot of people think that if you do, uh, qualitative research, like ethnography,
which is observing customers where they're doing stuff, it's just going to be, you know,
outrageously costly, but it's not really true. Um, when I've done, uh, exploration research of any
type, usually I found that if I focus on a type of customer, And collecting sufficient data from
them.
I really have all I need after maybe nine to 12 interviews. with that type of customer, right? If I'm
getting a lot more new information after 12 interviews, it means that I have two types of
customers. Right. Right. That's so, uh, that really makes it much more doable when you, you
start to get all repetitive information that you haven't, that you've already heard among the first
10 people, then you know, you have a pretty good.
Sampling of that, uh, that group. So then you add another group to see what, how they differ.
Mm hmm. Um, so this is. This is really huge because when you get expectations, really clear,
especially, not putting, arbitrary segments or labels on things, but just the data bubble up and
inform you naturally from how the customer sees things that can be really paradigm shifting for
your whole company and differentiate you in many ways.
This is really gold for guiding so many things in the company. It becomes useful for corporate
decisions. becomes useful for, every nook and cranny that doesn't touch the customer. That's
very overlooked these days. That's so good. I, I had a CEO once at a fortune 500 that felt like a
lot of that unstructured data was anecdotal.
So he refused that stuff. And I, it's interesting because what I'm imagining in my mind as I
listen is that. Some of that anecdotal data maybe can help drive what our then formal
Questions would be what we really want to dig into and i've seen a lot of organizations I've
done it myself previously in my career where I just like, um, I want to ask this and put some
questions down on a piece of paper that aren't guided by any data at all.
Really, I think probably there's a lot of bias in those questions that's, you know,
subconsciously steering them to the answer I want rather than this notion of. curiosity of
listening to what's bubbling up and going, Huh, that's interesting. I need to know more about
that and letting that kind of guide our research.
Do you see that happening? And what? What would your response be to that of How do you
do that better? Yeah, I applaud those few cases where it's happening, but it's kind of few and
far between. You know, I get a lot of insights by just testing my quantitative survey. So you
have a quantitative survey, you know, something that asks for ratings.
Test it. How do I test it is I take the questions as word strips and I might add other word strips
that I'm thinking about and put them in an envelope, right? So then I'll go and visit a customer
face to face and dump the envelope and say, please arrange these however you like. And I just
zip it for the amount of time that it takes for them to make an arrangement.
And I say. Tell me what it means. I've also done this digitally where you can put word strips on
the whiteboard and let them take mouse control and arrange things. It's very informative
because as they say, well, these go together. I didn't quite understand what these are, you
know, this. This leads to that, or this phrase is, uh, you know, kind of confusing to me.
Lightbulbs go like crazy in my mind, and I get tremendous insights, not only about how we
should fine tune the questionnaire to be consistently interpreted by every participant. Right. So
when you do this with multiple people, you're figuring out how to make your survey more
statistically valid, which is really important.
If it's not statistically valid, it has bias, uh, is inconsistently interpreted. Then your data isn't
very high quality, and therefore, you know, a lot of the things that you're trying to use CX
insights for a little misguided, not only that, I mean, all these light bulbs just lead to so many
other things, um, should be asking about this in the advisory board, maybe we should be, uh,
you know, doing more listening or, uh, sensitivity, for
this other thing. Oh my gosh, I love this. I'm a total geek about research and stuff and I think
I'm way better at it than I really am. I could play one on TV maybe, but, listening to you, I'm
like, oh, this is so good. I love it. One of the things that you mentioned in our other
conversation also that I'd love to touch on here is you talked about the idea of creating a
disposition report when we talk about our customers and where we're at.
Can you explain what that is and what would be included in it and how you might use it in your
role? Yeah. So, uh, usually in customer service, they have a dispositioning report, which is
saying these are the main topics that customers called about. Okay. Uh, not every customer
service group does it because of whatever technology they have.
Pressures on the agents and whatnot, but, uh, you can even do it after the fact by using text
mining and that type of thing to categorize what are the topics or using word clouds and that
type of thing to figure out the predominance of topics. And, uh, so, yeah, I mean, the whole
thing is that usually those just stand alone as. Here's the facts, here's what happened, and it
never goes any further. And if you're able to put money on any of those numbers to say, you
know, this is a trend that's flat. It's just there, but know that we are spending at least this
amount of money on these issues. Now it becomes much more interesting to executives
instead of just a status quo that we're okay with.
I think we desensitize our executives in the way that we show them the results. And are we
really that comfortable with having that degree of, of repetitiveness in these issues? Wouldn't it
be more interesting as a customer experience?
It's a powerful statement right there, rewind and listen to that again, people, we get kind of
comfortable. We get numb to these really being issues because we've seen them so long.
When I was leading a. About a hundred member call center. There were a lot of little areas
where this showed up and it was Um, it was everything from, oh, well, yeah, we know that's a
problem, but there's nothing we can do about it kind of thing, and also when we were started
to split into there and dive in, we realized there were definitions of.
First call resolution for instance, what does first call resolution mean it basically meant i'm
getting them off the phone For most of the agents and so I think that that's a really powerful
point is that? Knowing what is important to the customer what they're saying what continues to
be this kind of?
low grade headache That now we're just accustomed to the pain We just take a couple Tylenol
and now we don't even pay attention to it. I think it's powerful. Good statement. I love that
one. Um, I wanted to Talk a little bit about when we When we started our chat before you
talked about how in CX in general, you see this kind of mindset that has it backwards on what
CX success is from and where the money should be focused and all of that.
And you talked a little bit about, um, Investors versus customers. And you know, that we end
up getting our focus on the wrong thing, particularly if you're a public company, but I think I've
worked in nonprofits too, and nobody will ever convince me that it is not all about money in a
nonprofit as well, almost because they've got a scratch for every bit of it.
So can you talk a little bit about what you were thinking on that part where we get it all
backwards sometimes. So it goes back to what you were saying a moment ago that, um, we
can't do anything about it. Right. Think differently. Yes. So you're thinking in a silo. So you're in
customer service and you're like, well, we can only really manage what our agents do.
So we only want surveys to be about the agents. Almost every single survey that I do after a
transaction like that. I'm like, why in the heck aren't they asking about the issue that I called
about? That's what I really care about. The agent is so secondary or tertiary in my interests.
Really? Um, you know, I know they're doing the best they can almost always.
Yeah. It's just ridiculous. We need to be looking at customer experience as preventing the issue
in the first place. Ah. Yeah. This is what I mean by automatic experience excellence. When I,
buy things, I have a thousand things in front of me here in this room that I never really
interacted with the manufacturer.
Never really interacted with the retailer, but a moment and it's long ago. Will I recommend the
things that are in this room? Yes. Uh, even going to the blinds and the paint and the, you know,
whatever, there was plenty of things in this room that I will recommend and rebuy the same
things. And especially so if they were issue free, right?
So, you know, when people have contacted service, there already was an issue. And if you're
thinking about, there's nothing we can do about it, That's crazy because if you think about
everything else I've said You are a value center for customer insights That you cannot get in
any other type of survey.
You're a value center for that. So you need to have some kind of leadership in your service
organization or wherever you're doing a customer touchpoint management, customer success,
sales, wherever you're doing your nucleus of customer management, uh, have some leadership
people who can make friends with all of the other leaders in the company, uh, figure out how
you can channel customer insights to each of the originators of these issues.
Figure out how you can ask questions in your transaction surveys or whatever you're doing,
help these originators to know more about the issue. We need to really get to thinking like we
did when I started my career, how do we really improve our products and services and
attitudes and policies and so on?
The whole value. Proposition to deliver the one to one ratio between what we promised and
what they got from the get go, not just after something went wrong or something was
confusing, or, you know, the customer had a need to contact us. That's backwards thinking. It
is. Wow. That's powerful. And, and I can think of example after example, where the whole
focus was our numbers need to look great for our quarterly earnings call rather than, and there
was so much frenetic energy around that report and massaging everything so that the, um, the
quarterly report was right.
And there was so much less intense and concern about. If we make this better for the
customer, that is going to feed a better quarterly report for the investors. I love that. Yeah. If
you're in leadership and customer service, for example, you should take credit for turning the
customer propensity to go with a different brand, at least for part of their purchases of your
area.
So claim that. Look, we had this number of calls where we know that the customer was quite
upset at the beginning and, uh, amiable at the end. Therefore, for those types of customers or
this type of issue or the type of thing that they, they were calling about represents X amount of
our revenue. Yes. So I'm claiming that we contributed.
This X amount of revenue to next month. Wow. That's good. We have not intervened and saved
the day with those particular customers. We would have lost it. Right. So claim that and
redirect executive's attention to what you're really doing instead of figuring out how to upsell
and cross sell people when they've already had a fail.
Right. And it doesn't make any sense. I had a situation recently with a software for our agency
where I am so frustrated with it and it hasn't worked right. The things that were promised it at
the sale aren't even features that exist yet in the product, and I'm locked into a two year
contract. And so when I have brought up over and over and over again, this feature doesn't
work as it's supposed to, this is not working, the analytics aren't whatever.
Every single time I met with a, Oh, you have to upgrade to get that feature. And I'm just like.
Every single time I'm like, well, here's another 500 a month. Here's another I'm just like I don't
want any more of your product until this base Can get fixed and so I think it's funny that you
use that example that we want to And, and I'll honestly, I, I attribute that to the wrong focus
from leadership.
They're focused on upsells, not on the whole picture. When you're looking at these stupid
costs, uh, so called stupid, um, you can, you can start to see how much less pressure there will
be on things like inflation, raising your prices, skimflation, reducing your quality. Shrink inflation,
reducing what they get for what they paid, and frankly, flat out untruths in what you, what
they're going to get, uh, and all this pressure to get things out prematurely as a, uh, a product
launch or minimally viable product.
It's kind of a crazy way to manage things. I call it Jenga management. You're just, you know,
making holes, taking out the critical parts of your tower and then throwing it over the fence to,
uh, post purchase experience, and then putting it a traditional amount of pressure on that. I just
see that investors will be a lot happier if we're doing our business management much more
straightforward instead of all this craziness.
Sure. Well, and it's interesting from a financial perspective to think if we concentrated on
producing a better product, We won't need 20 more call reps to take all the complaints to walk
them through the solutions because they're coming. We have more patients to use more agile,
uh, check ins with customers, uh, do a better job with explorations, expectations research, and
also have better feedback loops that you actually can act on.
And do, rapidly, it would have a lot less churn for sure, probably of staff as well. I would be
scared to guess. Trust is a real crisis. If you've been following the Edelman trust barometer or
any of these other trust studies, you see that. It really hasn't changed in all these years that
we've been spending tremendously on customer experience.
I would expect that trust is increasing when we're trying to be more customer focused. We're
spending, you know, billions of dollars on customer experience. And it's affecting employee
experience. It's affecting everything, really. So be thinking about customer experience as
driving trust, driving relationship strength.
Driving value, continually increasing for customers. The only way you can do that is be looking
at things more holistically and more from the angle of the customer and the investors. That
statement's going on a poster.
I know that you shared that you did kind of a little bit of a pivot with your own professional
career. You know, not so much the consultancy. Stuff as much as the education piece and you
mentioned in that time A lot of materials or resources that you have available. I'd love for you to
touch on those And we'll put the links in the show notes for sure.
But what kinds of resources or Educational opportunities do you have available if someone's
interested in learning more? I think your wisdom is just Deep and profound. And as I said to
earlier, I love that you've been in the field a long time, but you aren't holding on to old things
that used to work.
You have evolved with the industry. And I love that some of those foundational principles you
started with are still the answer. So share with us how we can learn more. Absolutely. Well, you
know, I could spend all my time consulting a few companies and, on the road with
conferences, doing keynotes, but all of that kind of exhausts me, the travel, the invoicing, the
hurry up and wait, and so on, what I've figured out in the pandemic time was, I really like to
show people how to do things like, you know, teach them how to fish.
So I decided to put all of my wisdom into small bite opportunities for you to. Absorb it and
apply it. And these small bite opportunities look like training, but they're actually e consulting.
So I've packaged all of these things that I'm talking about here and tons more into 90 minute
segments that you can, get topic by topic as, What I call e consulting, but you might call it
training.
So that is at the foundational level, the intermediate level and the executive and expert level.
All consistent, but different, bells and whistles as you go up every level, this makes it possible
for whole departments or even, you know, their, extensions to learn together in live sessions or
in lunch and learns, extended staff meetings and so forth, because they have online resources
that are catered to each.
So we have automatic experience, excellence, experience, management, maturity. Experience
leadership for experts and executives, and then also the C suite guide to experience
management growth. That's a two hour session for them. In addition, there's a experience
value for the community.
Experience value exchange community allows you to learn things in five minute bites, 20
minute bites every day, because it's a subscription that you have all year. And, that really
focuses on ease of work and ease of business as, aspects of, of how you make this influence
happen. How do you get out of your silo?
So things like getting everybody on the same page, driving commitment, Helping to influence
respect for interdependencies. Establishing a lifetime value mindset and using customer
insights for all the growth and cost opportunities in your company. That's what you get badges
for as you learn those competencies in the, experience value exchange at clear action.
com. That sounds amazing. I've looked into a lot of certification programs for CX and training
and this and that from. Lot of well known institutions. And there's some really valuable nuggets
in there that I feel like are so practical. It's not theoretical only theories. Good. We need to have
it. But when it comes down to it, if you can't translate that into practical changes and how
we're behaving in CX, then we become part of the statistics that people are saying CX.
60 percent of us can't demonstrate value to the organization or how our work connects to the
organizational initiatives. And personally, as a senior ish CX professional, that is a burden for
me to help mentor the younger generations of CX folks who are coming up, it's not just about
making a name for yourself.
It's about getting the name of the customer center in that organization. And I feel like, that
some of the topics that you mentioned there, I'm like, oh, well, maybe I'll get my entire agency
to watch because we do CX with companies, but I always love to expand and learn. Yeah. So
think of it as going to one of the big three consultancies.
And, getting what, what their end result would be or almost free. I mean, right. You probably
spend any time, 90 minutes and, maybe a hundred bucks. And you've got really that caliber of
richness to absorb and apply in your role to have much stronger influence across your
company.
I'm grateful for those resources. I'm going to check them out for sure. So I, I, a couple of things
that you touched on that I just love and want to reiterate here is that the goal is to stop the
problem from happening in the first place. It's not just to. Make this person happier when they
called that is our immediate goal But the long term goal as as you said, is that aspiring to
automatic Service excellence. And I feel like if we can, yes, we have the short term fixes and
goals before us always, I feel like sometimes as professionals, that's as far as our vision goes,
we get to the, uh, my COO is mad about this thing, so this is all my energy or now this KPI has
dropped.
So, oh, this is all my energy, but you have any advice for individuals on how do you maintain
that short and long term view in your priority as just as an experienced leader in the field. What
are some things that you did to make sure you weren't losing sight of the forest for the tree?
Yeah. So if you're always looking at how much stuff costs That is a good way to keep on target
with, maintaining a plan to get to the root of the issue, right?
So you need to start getting more, uh, expertise or bringing in the people in quality or cost
continual improvement who know how to get to the root of things and engaging them. So keep
directing executives attention to. what we call customer experience annuities. Customer
experience annuities are where you resolve the root issue of something that's gone wrong and
redirect that budget to higher value opportunities.
That means that maybe you have more time for outreach to customers rather than responding
to problems, right? It means that you're troubleshooting engineers are freed up to create The
new patents and things like that, that continually give more value over the future. I mean, the,
the list is endless about all the upside.
So we have customer experience design where we're creating something. We have customer
experience improvement where we're getting to the root cause and preventing those things
and creating customer experience annuities, which can be way more, growth generating in
revenue than even design or the rollout of a new product in some cases actually can, can fund
all of the above.
Okay, and the ability to look at that customer annuities, is that in some of your materials? Yes,
absolutely. It's in chapter one. It's in chapter one because what we're focusing on too much is
the lagging indicators. Yes. Indicators are customer scores like net promoter or customer effort.
First contact resolution is also lagging because it already happened.
What we need to be focusing on and the things that we're doing that are mistake proofing. the
workflow, mistake proofing the outcomes that customers experience. So this, happens in
customer service. It also happens in legal and procurement and facilities and HR and
engineering and all the operational parts. Each one of them is probably contributing to some
costs that, are affecting customer service budget. So when we. share the customer insights
with all these groups and focus them on the top two things that they're causing to prevent
recurrence. And I call these customer critical factors. So the customer critical factors are what
you put into your recognition program, your compensation program, things like that.
Customer critical factors are in those people's workflows. case by case defined separately, but
call it customer critical factors. When they're making a certain percentage improvement in the
customer critical factor, then give them applause. Give them their bonus based on that. You will
know that your ratings are going to go higher and your finances are going to go much more.
fruitful when you, you are mistake proofing things in the customer critical factor area. And
that's the whole key to keeping the eye on the ball for the big picture, as well as, the continual
gains right now. Thank you for that wisdom. I appreciate it. I feel like I've learned a lot from you
today, so I appreciate it.
I'll look forward to, checking out your materials. As I said, we'll have the links down in the
show notes and how you can find them for yourself. , any last kind of thought or word of
wisdom for brand new to seasoned CX folks in our CX accelerator, we have thousands of
people around the globe.
What's your final parting nugget of wisdom for them? Yeah. Well, take a look at the other
initiatives in your organization, things that have happened historically, things that are happening
now, what were the success factors for those initiatives? How did they, engage people? How
did people maybe get turned off during those certain initiatives or, leave it to just that little party
that was doing things?
What you're trying to do with customer experience is actually make it a way of life across
everybody because, you know, at the end of the day, your business is successful when you've
met expectations or exceeded them. So How do you understand the expectations? Customer
experience. How do you exceed them?
Customer experience. So, you know, the whole idea is to get it right from the get go. And that
becomes a company wide initiative where everyone needs to be involved. So take a note from
other initiatives in your company as how you want to approach customer experience for full
engagement. That's brilliant, brilliant insight. I hope you caught that audience. And if you have.
Any other questions, feel free to reach out to Lynn.
Reach out to us. We're thrilled that you joined us today. Lynn, thank you for your time. We're
grateful it's my pleasure. Thank you so much for letting me share and I look forward to meeting
everybody.